The Rock Doctors Will Give You Better Taste in Music

WBEZ

Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, hosts of Sound Opinions from WBEZ Chicago, can cure your musical woes. As the Rock Doctors, they diagnose and treat listener afflictions across the medical spectrum—Phish-addicts, couples with incompatible music diets, or people with extreme allergies to anything that bloomed after Van Morrison.

Think of DeRogatis and Kot as music’s Siskel and Ebert, down to their popularity and their roots as rival newspaper columnists. So rather than turning to the obvious or generic solution (a “sounds like” rec that digital competition might offer), they turn extreme expertise into granular focus. To start, patients fill out a medical history form and do a pre-interview (“like a nurse doing triage”) with producer Robin Linn. This reveals what core characteristics—whether it’s an emphasis on smart lyrics or a particular style of percussion—are important in a prescription.

“If you said you don’t like EDM, do you actually have an aversion to the artificial sound of the drums? Or, maybe lyrics are really important to you and this isn’t a lyric-heavy genre. What if we can find some EDM that has really smart lyrics, or maybe a band that merges these sensibilities?” Linn says (noting LCD Soundsystem as an example). “Digging a little deeper and deconstructing helps us make better assessments.”

As with real medicine, not every solution is immediately effective. And Linn and the rest of the Sound Opinions team don’t always agree with what the doctors ultimately suggest. But just as their medical counterparts strive to prompt long-term health, the Rock Doctors primarily have patients’ future listening in mind.

“There’s so much great music. So obviously, you’re hoping to get them addicted,” DeRogatis says. “It’s just like how Pfizer would like us to be reliant on a pill they manufacture so we have to take it for the rest of our lives. We want people to realize there’s all this great stuff out there. Go discover it.”

The Rock Doctors are still going strong with new Sound Opinions episodes and podcasts. So far, they’ve found cures about 70 percent of the time—here are a few sample prescriptions.

Economist Paul Krugman had written off any music recorded after 1980; then he ingested some Arcade Fire and found it to his liking. What’s next? Treatment: folk and melody. The docs suggested Wye Oak and Gruff Rhys. Krugman didn’t love the albums but was compelled by their live performances.
Paul Krugman Episode

Andrew and girlfriend Kelli needed a checkup. Her diet of ’70s rock and his insistence on musical adventurousness left the two unable to sync up. Treatment: Incremental therapy (a modern Cheap Trick album) failed, but radical intervention (an electronica jolt from La Roux) provided relief.
Andrew and Kelli Episode

NPR’s Peter Sagal had been self-medicating with singer-songwriters like Elvis Costello for too long. Treatment: theatricality, like the Decemberists and New Pornographers, plus music with a dark sense of humor, especially Kanye West.
Peter Sagal Episode

Pat had been on a regimen of Bob Dylan and Wilco for years. But her nephews started engaging in hip hop and she thought it could be something they enjoyed together.
Treatment: a challenging dose of vintage Outkast proved too raunchy, but Pat loved the storytelling approach of De La Soul.
Pat and her nephews Episode